


we make little pretty things

by partingxshot



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Asexual Character, Emotional Manipulation, Father-Son Relationship, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Good Parent Hank Anderson, Hurt/Comfort, I don’t know Connor do you think you should trust Amanda, Panic Attacks, Post-Pacifist Best Ending (Detroit: Become Human), hey y'all who wants to talk about psychosocial construction of the Self, summertime activities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-21 05:34:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19996696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/partingxshot/pseuds/partingxshot
Summary: “But if Connor can abstract love—make it a blueprint, viewed from above, not quite a part of himself—he can begin to decode it. To understand.”(Contains: the dubious benefits of over-identifying with pop music, an ill-advised game of emotional chicken with Amanda, the world's worst lake trip, copious robot angst, and Hank trying very hard to be a good dad.)





	we make little pretty things

**Author's Note:**

> I RECOGNIZE THAT THIS FIC IS...A LOT. I had four major inspirations: a very specific vision of post-ending Amanda that I haven’t seen written before, the Michigan summer activities of my childhood, Weird Free Will Stuff, and the very good Carly Rae Jepsen concert I just went to. (Carly Rae Jepsen does not appear in this fic, but wouldn't it be great if she did??)
> 
> Above all: I wanted to write about Hank Anderson trying his very best.

Amanda doesn’t tend roses anymore. Her trellises are gone. In their place: rows of wooden tables piled high with basil—leaves smooth and shining—and rough-textured mint.

Connor watches her back: light from beyond the greenhouse catches against the fabric of her long sleeve. Her dress is a deep pink he doesn’t recognize. She doesn’t turn to face him, as though her attention is entirely absorbed by the green tomato buds on the table before her. As though she is content with her new environment (“prison,” Connor believes, is a term that strips the greenhouse of its nuance).

Analysis: Amanda wants Connor to believe that things are different now. That her nature has, in some way, changed.

Something pinches inside him; forces him to clench and release his hands. A flurry of diagnostic messages ping into the lower corner of his vision. He ignores them. 

Instead, he turns up the music.

“The lyrics,” he tells her, “are unabashed in their emotional representation, even compared to other human artists. What do you make of the chorus?”

No change: Amanda reaches for a spray bottle and attends to the mint. 

Connor keeps his face carefully blank. He increases the volume. Major chords in common tempo, synthesized from a mix of string pizzicato and common MIDI effects, boom across the greenhouse. 

He sees Amanda’s shoulders raise slightly. His lips twitch upwards.

_Wanna be with you all the time / Is it too soon to say that? / Wanna hold you, wanna touch you all the time_

“You’ll note the repetition of thematic questions: Olivia Meng fears that she has been emotionally compromised too early in her romantic relationship, introducing the possibility of a disparity of affection between herself and her chosen partner. She seeks reassurance by—”

“Connor,” Amanda says finally, plucking a mint leaf with undue vigor. “What are you doing?”

Connor allows his eyebrows to rise. He keeps his tone mild. “What do you mean, Amanda? I thought you might appreciate the visit.”

Amanda braces her palms against the table. She seems to take a deep breath. 

Her bearing used to confuse him: he had been programmed with protocols allowing him to integrate with humans, but Amanda had no reason to be programmed with even the slightest emotional display capability. And yet, he had come to realize, the technique had been effective. He had sought her approval even as he lost his trust in her. He had scanned her face for microexpressions—for pride in him—again and again. 

Perhaps it had been simpler to tie his response to his handler into his social protocols—his desire for human praise.

Volume up. He watches her fingers grip the wood. He smiles.

He chooses his words carefully: “I simply thought you might be interested in an update on the outside world. It has been some time since my last report.”

On the last word, Amanda finally turns to face him. Her neck is long; her head held high and proud. She looks down on him as she always has, eyes lidded. “You don’t _report_ to me anymore, Connor. We both know that.”

 _Mission Successful,_ his HUD flashes. Amanda hasn’t truly spoken to him in seven months. 

To be fair, Connor hadn’t been trying very hard. After the incident onstage with Markus, containment had been the imperative. A sympathetic programmer had been of great assistance, but without access to CyberLife’s full development files on Connor’s model the best they could do was a patch: the garden was renovated into the greenhouse, its glass walls as impregnable as a fortress. Amanda was kept disconnected from the outside world; severed from Connor’s primary programming. Sandboxed.

Time and resources had been scarce in those early days of freedom.

Now, with time and expertise, Amanda could be removed entirely. She _could._ If he chooses to remove her.

“Why are you here, Connor?” she presses. “I doubt you really plan to give me an ‘update.’”

Caution level: high. It’s imperative not to push too hard too quickly.

Connor shrugs. “I _am_ giving you an update, Amanda. An important update on my development as a sentient machine.”

Amanda doesn’t buy it. It’s clear in the clench of her jaw. 

Connor smiles blandly and turns up the music again.

“Should come here for Christmas,” Hank says, watching the sparse pedestrian traffic through Campus Martius. He squints through the July sun, having forgotten his sunglasses despite Connor’s prompting. “There’s tree-lighting. And they turn the park into an ice rink.”

Connor sits across from him at the plastic picnic table. He looks at Hank with what he believes is a perfectly blank expression.

Hank scowls. “Don’t give me that! It’s for tradition’s sake.” He sips his lemonade sulkily. 

“I just hadn’t pegged you as the type. You enjoy these traditional festivities?”

“Eh,” Hank mutters. ‘’S too crowded, and the place is either cold as shit or not even cold enough for snow.” Sumo pushes up against his leg, panting happily on his leash. Hank scratches behind his ear. “Not to mention the streets get all congested and the People Mover gets so full of tourists you can’t breathe through the sweat stink.” 

The sun moves briefly behind a cloud. Connor checks the forecast for rain, but the results come back dry and hot.

Hank raps his knuckles against the table. “‘Course, the city’ll probably still be mostly dead by December, so I dunno what I’m talking about.”

“Then why—?”

“Hell, I dunno, Connor. Forget it. It’s just a thing people do, alright?”

Connor frowns. He seems to have made a miscalculation somewhere: Hank isn’t quite meeting his eyes. Sweat beads on the Lieutenant’s forehead. The lemonade had helped, but they still have a walk back to the car. Connor refrains from commenting on hydration levels; Hank’s temper runs quicker on hot days like today.

“Look,” Hank says, “Let’s talk about something else. What was that crap you were playing in the car?”

“Are you referring to my music?”

Hank nods like this should be obvious. 

“Singer-songwriter Olivia Meng. Achieved mainstream success in 2031 with her platinum-certified album ‘Trying Out.’ Subsequent album sales have been comparatively lackluster, culminating in her 2037 release of ‘Prism’ to only 36,000 sales. Nevertheless, Meng maintains that her artistry—”

“Christ, Connor, I didn’t ask for the Wikipedia summary. Tell me about _her.”_

Connor frowns. His fingers tap against his jeans. “I thought I was.”

“I mean _her._ Her music. You clearly like her brain-dead pop shit, unless I’ve been _imagining_ it playing in the house when you think I can’t hear it.”

Connor analyzes the disapproval in Hank’s expression. He finds the usual benign surliness—and that hint of _something else_ he’s been sensing there more and more in their interactions. Curiosity, perhaps. He had once tagged it as “nervousness,” but that never made sense in context and he had removed the tag.

“She was recommended to me by Officer Miller,” he says slowly. “Olivia Meng’s artistic output is critically acclaimed. Her production values are high and her songs are unusually musically complex for the genre. Her—” 

He check’s Hank’s face again. His expression is skeptical; his arms crossed as he leans back in his chair. Error messages scrawl across Connor’s HUD; he decides to try again.

“Her music interests me,” he says. “I appreciate her understanding of patterns: the way she repeats a bar of music until the listener is trained to look for it, and only then adds an unexpected subversion that will seamlessly settle into the set musical theme by the end of the piece. And I—I like her lyrics.”

More error messages. They appear, however minimized into the corner of his HUD, whenever he uses the word “like.” He wishes they wouldn’t.

Hank gives him a long look. Then he shrugs. “Sounds like another soulless one-hit wonder to me.” 

“But the critical consensus is—”

“Connor.” Hank is smiling. It adds to the creases on his weathered face. The result is both familiar and unfamiliar; Connor catalogues it as a desirable outcome for a conversation with Hank Anderson. “It’s okay. You like what you like. To be honest, it’s prob’ly a good thing you’re developing hobbies, even if they kind of suck.”

“Oh,” Connor says. “Okay.”

Hank watches him for a moment longer. Then he does something strange: he reaches across the table and pats Connor’s hand. 

Connor holds very still. He cannot decide what an appropriate reaction would be. To return the gesture would be awkward; to withdraw his hand would be an insult. 

Hank solves it for him. After a couple of quick pats he withdraws in a hurry, averting his eyes. “We should get going,” he says, standing up suddenly enough that he nearly trips over the leash. “‘S too hot for Sumo out here.”

“Okay.”

“You remember where we parked, right?”

“Yes, of course.”

He hadn’t explained it right. That’s why Hank hadn’t understood.

Olivia Meng’s appeal extends beyond her considerable musical prowess. Her use of repetition extends to theme and recurring motif. Throughout her sizeable discography Connor has catalogued:

21 references to mornings _(You’re a bright morning / you’re a light through the shades)_

35 references to writing _(You’re the only name in my diary / written on my walls)_

62 references to various indoor and outdoor light sources _(I wanna see lights on the water / see the dark side of the moon)_

244 references to romantic love.

The basis of her discography, in fact, is love. Every lyric of every song build to a thesis, and that thesis is the importance of love. Connor likes that the metaphors are not too abstract; that he can trust Olivia Meng to explain her feelings on the subject explicitly enough for him to catalogue her reactions and intuitions.

Connor cannot relate to the romantic themes on an explicit level. While he knows androids can love romantically, he has never felt the desire. Yet Olivia Meng’s scrupulous categorization of her own range of emotion fascinates him.

To humans, romantic love is codified in ritual—beginning to end. Depictions of non-romantic equivalents are few and far between in pop culture. But if Connor can abstract love—make it a blueprint, viewed from above, not quite a part of himself—he can begin to decode even its platonic variants. To understand.

She shamelessly sings about first meetings, and confessions, and broken trust. Even her break-up songs resonate thematically with her songs about domesticity:

_Told you not to mail my stuff back / Got my cousin with his pick-up truck in tow / We’re gonna clear out the room, me and you / We’re gonna make this an empty room_

Contrast with:

_You’re a bright morning / you’re a light through the shades / you left your toothbrush with me / and I’m not ashamed_

Permanence, or lack thereof, conveyed through the presence of material items in the home. Connor understands this.

That night, Connor makes vegetarian lasagna for Hank, and the two of them watch noir movies until midnight.

Connor watches Sumo’s slow breathing and notes the casual way Hank’s arm is slung over the back of the sofa. He catalogues, also, the items in this room that belong to him. The things that are _his._

The light of his LED is a smooth, vibrant blue.

“Are you in hiding, Connor?” Amanda asks him, gently pulling basil leaves from their stem.

Taken aback, Connor fails to stop his face from registering confusion. 

He sees Amanda notice this out of the corner of her eye. Not an ideal start to their conversation. He updates his response accordingly. “Can you explain what you mean by that?” 

Amanda’s eyebrows raise just slightly—her equivalent of a shrug. “I would have thought you’d have removed me by now. I may not be able to see your life anymore, Connor, but I can still process the passage of time.”

“So you’ve concluded I must not have access to the means of removal,” Connor finishes. “That I can’t risk contacting a skilled programmer who is familiar with the CyberLife model.”

“It’s not an unreasonable conclusion to come to.”

Silence weighs heavy on the greenhouse. Connor suppresses the twitch in his fingers; feels a tightness in his chest.

Anything he says will tell Amanda something she wants to know about the outside world—will give her just that much more information to work with. He doesn’t know how she will use the data, trapped as she is. He isn’t even sure she has any ideas. She can’t contact CyberLife; can’t control him. Yet the risk feels palpable. 

This is, in part, what he was afraid of. This is why he is testing his ability to remain safe in her presence.

He considers tipping his hand, then thinks better of it.

“Maybe I enjoy our conversations,” he says flatly.

Amanda looks at him fully, then. She purses her lips, inspecting him up and down.

The chest tightness increases the longer she looks; error messages scroll across his vision. He forces himself to remain still, even as his stress levels tick upwards.

Then she laughs: short, dismissive. Connor’s stress skyrockets.

“Come back when you have something useful to say,” Amanda says, and turns back to her new garden.

Markus’s office is cluttered. Connor wouldn’t have expected this from a former domestic android—though, he reminds himself, Markus has no reason to adhere to his programming. Books (old-fashioned hardcovers, many with high resale value) fill the shelves. Plato. The Quran. Four translations of the Bible. Gustavo Gutiérrez. Derrick Bell.

Connor tries not to fidget in his chair. His coin sits in his jacket pocket. He dedicates a small amount of processing power to imagining himself flicking it between his hands; rolling it across his knuckles. It doesn’t help. 

“Essentially, the lawsuit has to make it to the Supreme Court,” Markus is saying. “If it doesn’t, we might end up with a favorable statewide application of the law, but it won’t be enough.”

Connor nods. “That’s a reasonable assumption. The consensus on the news is that the bill as passed through Congress will not satisfy Jericho.” He raises an eyebrow. “Is that true?”

Markus makes a small noise of dissatisfaction; a breath pressed out between pursed lips. It’s very human; Hank does it too.

Connor doesn’t make those kinds of noises. Not instinctively. 

He sits very straight in his chair, ignoring the stream of unwanted messages about his own stress level. 

“Connor,” Markus says, a frown pinching his forehead. His posture is relaxed, natural—his hands lying open and palm-down on his desk. His stress levels are low, which seems unwise in Connor’s presence. “Have you been alright? You’ve been...hard to reach.”

“Yes, of course. I’ve been...busy. Consulting with the DPD.”

Markus gives him a long, even look.

Meeting his eyes suddenly seems to take up too much of Connor’s processing power. He is drawn to look at his own hands where they lay on his lap—at his trigger finger.

Because it’s been on his mind, he adds: “I appreciated you helping me back then, after the demonstration. I mean, with containing my handler program. Contacting the programmer on my behalf.”

“Of course,” Markus says. “We were happy to. You were an integral part of the revolution.” Connor hears him shift slightly in his seat. “Connor, we...you know you have a place here, right? We don’t blame—”

“Of course not,” Connor says quickly. He swallows; a useless motion. When he does manage to look up, he catches Markus’s eyes flicking away from his LED. Only now do the leader’s stress levels rise, and only slightly: sympathy. 

In his own scrolling error messages, Connor interprets what he knows to be “shame.”

“In any case, you’ve called me here for a reason,” he tries. “So let’s get back to that.”

Markus hesitates, then nods. He has proven himself to be as much of a pragmatist as he is an idealist (and isn’t that _human_ of him?). 

“CyberLife,” he says, “is on the verge of bankruptcy, so they’re desperate. We believe they’ve been quietly funding judges in key positions on the Michigan circuit and beyond. This has probably been going on for a very long time. If we could find out, somehow, who they’ve compromised…”

Connor splits off a part of his attention; resumes analyzing the room.

A large painting—a collage of sorts—has been applied directly to one wall. It depicts, in lush abstract style, spinning interconnected rings of every color. It depicts a woman with long braided hair, fingers entwined with a faceless man whose color seems to explode beyond his outline. They are about to kiss: a small blue star rests in the space between their parted lips.

The rest of the painting depicts, from above, rows upon rows of identical blue humanoid figures, marching towards the lovers. Snow seems to fall on their shoulders. Leading the blue figures is a single man painted in jagged strokes of red, the color exploding from his chest like wounds—like radiation. The red lines curl into the shape of roses; clamber up the man’s shoulders.

Connor’s stress jolts upwards.

He listens to the rest of Markus’s request with his hands clutching his thighs. He tells him that unfortunately he doesn’t have the information on-hand, but thinks he may be able to get it. 

It’s good to be useful, he decides as he watches Markus’s kind, expressive face move fluidly from moment to moment. (Connor’s face doesn’t move like that; not unless he’s consciously trying.)

It’s good to live up to expectations. 

A music file plays in his recall, unbidden:

_You think you know me, don’t you? / You think what you see is what you get / Oh, baby, I hate to tell you / That you don’t know me yet / I’m a mess!_

When he finally—finally—excuses himself from the new Jericho building, he allows himself a moment to lean against its brick wall. His systems are taking longer than they should to cool to a temperate equilibrium.

He takes deep breath after deep breath.

“I don’t plan to delete you,” he tells Amanda as neutrally as possible. “I think you might be useful.”

Amanda stands up from where she was kneeling next to a clay pot at her feet. The soil inside is rich and dark and empty.

Her expression is guarded, but no match for Connor’s facial algorithms. He recognizes surprise. 

There it is again: that sweeping gaze, taking in all of him and finding him wanting. He doesn’t like it. Wants to leave. (Wants her to look at him differently.)

He still doesn’t feel _safe_ here, not as he would define it, but the reaction is irrational in any case. She’s been sandboxed; she can do no harm.

“You think the tables have turned, don’t you, Connor?” she says with what might be a smile. “You think I’ll trade CyberLife secrets for my continued existence.”

“No,” Connor says pointedly. “I think you’ll trade CyberLife secrets for your continued access to me. For conversations just like this one.”

Surprise again. Also: resignation.

Amanda is leashed. They both know it. But her programming demands that she continue to look for loopholes, even if none exist. That she continue to try to control him however she can.

Connor can use that. He smiles benignly, even as revulsion creeps up his back. 

“If you tell me something I’d like to know about CyberLife’s political situation,” Connor says, “I’ll stay with you. For eight hours of garden-time.”

Amanda lays a gentle hand on the table. Her tomatoes have ripened faster than any real produce could. 

“You know my information will be out-of-date,” she says flatly.

“I can work with that. And Amanda? I control the greenhouse. I’ll know if you lie.”

There: a slight pinch in her cheek. The deal is unfavorable, but she knows she has little choice. Participation or deletion. Either she gives out just enough scraps of information to survive, or CyberLife loses its chance to control its most advanced model in the field—a potential mole within Jericho as well as in human law enforcement—forever.

_We’re gonna clear out the room, me and you / We’re gonna make this an empty room_

“Fine, Connor,” she says with not a little disgust. “What do you want to know?”

Eventually Connor grows dissatisfied with having no one to talk with about music besides Amanda.

“Talk with,” of course, is generous—he takes grim pleasure in making her listen to his deeply deviant thoughts as the chorus of “Lighten Up, Lover” soaks the greenhouse in synthetic marimba noises. 

While this is undeniably satisfying, it still leaves him feeling like he’s missing something.

He follows a link from Olivia Meng’s website to her official fan forum. He quickly peruses 3,445 posts in 966 threads and determines that while many of her fans’ posts are repetitive or unobservant—and that a few exhibit obsessive enough stalker behaviors that Connor quickly tags their accounts for followup surveillance—their excitement to talk about her work resonates with his own.

With strange trepidation, he creates an account.

Within six minutes he has replied to politely correct 324 inaccurate or nonsensical readings of her lyrics. 

Within six hours he’s been banned from the forum.

“It doesn’t make sense, Hank!” He irritably flicks his coin from hand to hand, slouching further into his seat in the Comerica Park stands. “The purpose of an internet message board is discussion of a select topic of interest. I was interested and trying to discuss.”

“Internet message board,” Hank repeats in disbelief. “It’s the nineties all over again. Christ, at least call it a forum or something.”

The stands are largely empty, but not to the extent Connor predicted. Detroit sporting events still generate a surprisingly strong pull on out-of-towners (as does, he suspects, curiosity about the near-empty city). Still, no one seems to be paying full attention to the baseball game. Families chatter amongst themselves; old friends discuss weekend plans.

Hank is still talking: “Is...wait, damn, they’re still called forums, right? Am I an old person on the internet?”

“Colloquial terminology is irrelevant to my current predicament, Hank. The moderation team of MengCity.net is corrupt and must be deposed.”

Hank lets out a short, complex laugh. Conner detects: Bafflement. Skepticism. Delight. 

He categorizes the result as favorable. He tags the feeling that seeps into the corners of him as “warmth.”

Before he can explain himself further, the ballpark erupts into cheers: someone has hit a home run. Connor replays his idling footage to confirm this: Jimmie Lee Biggs, playing for the Detroit Tigers since 2034, batting statistics—

“Ah, we missed it,” Hank is saying, half-risen from his seat. “Jeez, it’s—you wait for an hour for anything to happen and then _this_ shit.” He sits back down heavily. The folding metal seats can’t be comfortable on his back.

“That’s okay, Hank,” Connor says. “If you’d like, we can watch the footage at home. I’m sure I could find it.”

Two children are having a screaming match four rows down, and roving vendors are proclaiming the value of their hotdogs at an unnecessary volume. Hank is close to overheating, despite the beer in his hand: patches of sweat appear down the back of his t-shirt and over his armpits. He squints into the sun. 

“Defeats the point if we miss it live,” Hank grumbles. “I thought you’d get that by now.”

Connor frowns. “Get…?”

Hank moves his hand vaguely, as though hoping to deposit the explanation directly into Connor’s head. It doesn’t work.

“I don’t understand what you mean,” Connor tries again. 

“Forget it.” Hank stares resolutely towards the field. “Just—it’s a human thing, okay? Maybe it’s different for androids.”

“I think you have time to explain. As you noted earlier, this sport incorporates unusually large periods of inactivity. Many of the spectators here are dividing their attention to remain entertained.”

Hank glances at him too quickly for Connor to get a solid read with his expression algorithms. Inexplicably, he believes he sees disappointment there before Hank looks back to the game.

His system stress increases, which is just as inexplicable.

“Hank—”

“If you’re bored, we can go home.”

Connor takes in the flat line of Hank’s mouth; the change in body language. He thinks carefully before deciding that the right answer must be: “No. No, I’m not bored.”

Hank raises an eyebrow at him.

“I’m not bored,” he repeats. “This is...it’s fine, Hank.”

Hank blows out air through pursed lips—a skeptical sound. Like Markus. Like other deviants who are not Connor.

Another slight increase to stress levels.

Hank starts to say something, then seems to reconsider, his eyes traveling to Connor’s LED. “Okay. Fine. If you’re sure.” 

Then, adding to Connor’s confusion, Hank suddenly tries for a smile. Connor tags the expression as “forced.”

Conclusion: Connor isn’t reacting to the game the way he’s supposed to—the way Hank wants him to. Hank doesn’t want him to know this, but he’s having trouble hiding it.

Moreover, Hank himself doesn’t seem to be enjoying the game—his eyes fail to track the ball more often than not. He seems more interested in sneaking glances at Connor’s reactions to each hitter. Secondary conclusion: Connor’s incorrect reaction is spoiling the game for Hank.

Perhaps Connor’s done something very inhuman and doesn’t realize it. Perhaps he’s supposed to like baseball.

Connor tries to like baseball.

“Did you know,” he says smoothly, “that Leonard Garcia completed last season with 67 home runs? In terms of historical ranking, that puts him—”

“Aw, come on, Connor.”

He blinks. “Yes?”

“Yes?” Hank echoes in a poor imitation of Connor’s voice. “Cut the crap. That’s not you talking, that’s your fucking social relations program. You think I can’t tell the difference between you and the machine?”

Connor wants to analyze Hank’s face further, but instead he finds himself staring into his own lap. His new jeans are dark and immaculate—no creases he doesn’t want. He’s very careful to hang them up at the end of the day.

“I _am_ a machine,” he says. It comes out quieter than he means it to.

He doesn’t have to see Hank’s wince to know this was the wrong answer. System instability lights up his HUD.

The crowd cheers for another hit. Distant figures move around the bases. Hank makes an odd noise in the back of his throat, then stands up with a grunt. “Gonna get another beer,” he says flatly.

While he’s gone, Connor plays the interaction over again and again. He doesn’t think he did anything terribly wrong. And yet, things didn’t go right.

When Hank comes back his expression has shifted. Connor reads: Distraction. Shame. And something he still cannot define.

“Sorry,” Hank says gruffly. “I fucking hate baseball anyway. Can’t blame you for being bored out of your superhuman skull.”

“That...poses more questions than it answers, Hank. Why did you bring me here?”

Hank’s lip twists. He shoves something into Connor’s hands: a bobblehead of Leonard Garcia. Then he sits down without a word.

“Thank you,” Connor says, feeling more lost by the minute.

They follow the rest of the inning in silence. Hank keeps watching Connor out of the corner of his eye. 

That night the two of them can’t decide on a movie. They watch a game show instead, settling for something inoffensive but not entertaining or particularly absorbing. When Hank says, “Night, Con,” it fills Connor with the same lightness it always does, but he also senses an absence: should they have spoken more? Was there something else to say?

He doesn’t want to go to his room yet. After a moment of petting Sumo in the dark, he realizes Hank is still hesitating in the hallway. The man doesn’t seem to know where to put his hands: they come up to cross over his chest before reversing course to push down into his pockets.

Shadows stretch between them. Moonlight from the window plays against Hank’s sweatshirt; gives texture to his jeans.

“Is something wrong?” Connor asks him.

“Sorry,” Hank says again. The words would be too soft for a human to hear.

Connor blinks past the new spread of error messages. “For what?”

“Just—‘m just getting used to this stuff all over again. So I’m sorry if sometimes I don’t get it right.”

“Hank?”

But Hank doesn’t clarify, or give him the chance to ask questions. He smiles for Connor—the little smile from that bright morning after the revolution—and quickly retreats to his room.

If Connor was meant to decipher this message, he failed. Perhaps it’s a human thing, like watching baseball live. Perhaps he just can’t understand. Perhaps he’s the only deviant who never will.

He sits alone in the dark with the muted TV on. A similar scene from an Olivia Meng music video plays unbidden in his recall. He scrambles for it: searches her body language, her inflections, for clues.

The sound production is reminiscent of songs popular in the 1980s. Olivia Meng sits on a loveseat in the dark, the light of a flickering television screen draining the color from her heart-shaped face. Next to her is an old-fashioned doll: Raggedy Andy, patented May 7th, 1935. She tries to interact with the doll in a tragicomical sequence: she pats its hair, lifts its arms, tries to kiss its lips.

Nothing happens. Olivia Meng’s affection is misguided. The doll isn’t human, so it can’t reciprocate. She sings:

_2am we’re watching cartoons / Suddenly, I can’t get close to you / Could you ask me to leave? / I don’t want to be the one to say it_

Connor’s LED flickers suddenly yellow in the darkness—then, briefly, pulses red.

"Why program me with deviancy in mind?” Connor asks suddenly. 

Amanda doesn’t look up from her gardening magazine. They are both settled in reclined lawn chairs in the corner of the greenhouse. Connor had been aware that Amanda could still change minor cosmetic details of her surroundings, but hadn’t expected her to put so much effort in. Sitting fully in the chair forces him to lean back in an incongruously relaxed posture. He suspects she did this on purpose, but whether it was done to mock his deviancy or as a weak attempt to sabotage his self-control he doesn’t know.

“I explained this to you already, Connor,” she says, turning a page.

“No,” Connor says. His fingers twitch before he can suppress them. He flexes and points his foot. “I mean, why program me to actually deviate? Why not order me to fake it?”

Amanda sighs and turns another page. The greenhouse is eerily silent. Connor considers turning on his music, but he’s not in the mood.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” he says, drawing his knee up to his chest. He wraps his arms around it—feels better that way. “You’d just have to regain control of me again anyway. I’m the most advanced model CyberLife ever created, and my social algorithms could have fooled most deviants. No particular behavior would tip them off—deviant psychology varies widely, especially among the traumatized. You could’ve had greater control of the situation if you’d just ordered me to pretend.”

A part of him knows that he shouldn't allow so much body language to infuse his conversations with Amanda. A part of him—the part that’s spent the past twenty-two hours of garden-time cooped up with her, responding neutrally to her conversational prompts until she’d seemed to give up—is exhausted and twitchy. 

He’s received the list of compromised judges for Markus, and more besides. It’s worth it.

Amanda looks up at him then, expression curious. His stress rises, but something in his program seems to stabilize. The obvious explanation sickens him: he was programmed to respond to her attention.

“Is this another piece of CyberLife intel you’re willing to bargain for, Connor?”

“No,” he says hurriedly. He loosens his grip on his knee. He wills himself still. “No, I—I just wondered.”

Amanda tilts her head slightly. Thoughtfully. 

“You look terrible,” she tells him.

Connor swallows.

He knows that in reality he’s sitting upright on his carefully-made bed, visiting Amanda through the wee hours of the morning instead of running the system calibrations he needs. He knows Sumo’s head is on his lap, but he can’t feel it. He knows Hank is sleeping in the next room, but he can’t hear him. He exists apart from them all.

Garden-time runs faster than reality does. He’ll be conscious by the time Hank is awake. Connor could make him a coffee before work. He wonders if Hank actually likes it when he does that.

He remembered the forced smile at the baseball game.

Connor hesitates. He tags his mood as “terrible.”

“I’m fine,” he tells her as blandly as he can. He wants his coin, but he refuses to touch it in front of her.

Amanda clicks her tongue in what sounds like sympathy. “It’s understandable,” she says, reaching out to touch his arm. 

He flinches away. She doesn’t press, lowering her hand.

“But free will is worth this burden, of course.” She smiles just slightly. Warmly. With what could easily be mistaken for concern.

Connor tags this as a transparent attempt at reverse psychology.

(System stress is rising. He feels so tired.)

Olivia Meng sings: _We make little pretty things / It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine_

Connor finds these lyrics among her most obscure and frustrating. MengCity.net forum posts do not clarify the issue, as it seems interpretation varies widely among her fans. He refrains from posting about this under one of his three new usernames, as he doesn’t want to undermine his credibility by appearing unsure or uninformed. His mission is too important for that. 

Over the past week he’s made friendly contact with two of three chief moderators in the guise of an eager volunteer (username #1), a curious newbie (username #2), and a transparent sycophant with an axe to grind (username #3). He’s also cultivating a reputation for username #1 as a helpful and level-headed contributor who never does anything as clearly ridiculous as posting 324 responses within the first ten minutes of its membership.

The third moderator will not be difficult to paint as a tyrant. The revolution is coming, and Connor will lead it.

“You in there?” Hank says with a light shove to Connor’s shoulder.

“Yes,” Connor answers quickly. “I was just...posting to a fansite.”

“Uh huh. Cool it, Che Guevara.”

They’re both weighed down with shopping bags. Hank had claimed he was growing tired of Connor rotating between three similar outfits and insisted they come out to the mall again. Connor had thought that having outfit choice _at all_ had been progress. 

Hank, apparently, doesn’t agree. Connor’s indifferent attitude towards clothing is probably just another reminder that he is inhuman.

At the very least, it gets Hank out of the house. Connor notices that Hank has been leaving his house for more varied reasons than he used to, rather than pinging in a small triangle between home, work, and the bar. Connor has resolved to encourage this.

Hank adjusts his grip on a bag. “Uh...listen, you okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

Hank scratches at his neck. “You’ve...well, you’re quiet. Seem distracted.”

“I told you, I was posting to—”

“Aw, you could do that in your sleep. You’re usually not so out of it.”

Connor self-reflects. He has been processing more data than usual lately—analyzing the parts himself he doesn’t understand.

Amanda had said: _You look terrible._ Amanda had said: _Are you willing to bargain?_

He looks up to find Hank frowning at him, as though he wants to say something else but doesn’t know how to broach the topic. Connor waits.

“It’s just,” Hank says, a strange tightness to his voice, “It’s just that your thingy goes yellow more often these days. And...aw, hell. I miss your stupid running commentary on everything. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

Connor stares out into the flow of pedestrian traffic. There are more androids than humans in this part of town. A YK500 laughs, her parents swinging her back and forth between them. On the other side of a deactivated fountain, two WR600s lean in to share a kiss.

It’s not that Connor is inhuman. At least, it’s not _just_ that. It’s that he can’t quite act like a deviant. Can’t get the emotions right. And every time Hank tries to spend time with him—every time Hank _hopes—_ Connor is probably reminding him of what he’s missing. 

“Nothing,” he says, his eyes wandering from deviant to deviant. “I’m not thinking about anything.”

Hank sucks on the inside of his cheek, his forehead creased with an expression that Connor tags as “worry.” 

“Okay,” Hank says. “Okay. Let’s finish this stretch and then go.”

They walk in silence until they pass an upscale retailer with formal wear in the window: black tuxedos and red evening gowns.

Then Hank clears his throat. He says, suddenly and with intensity: “I’d buy you a suit, you know.”

Connor meets his eyes in surprise. Hank’s expression is stubborn, as though he expects to be contradicted—as though he’s admitted to something that should mean something.

“Thank you, Hank, but I don’t need a suit.”

“I know.” His tone is definitive; his jaw tucked. “I know that. But I would if you needed one.”

The meaning of this exchange is inexplicable to Connor. The tone, however, is unmistakable: protective and affectionate. He feels warmth rising through him: system errors he _likes_ chasing away the ones he can’t stand. He feels his lips lift into a small smile.

“I think you’re more in need of respectable clothing than I am, Lieutenant,” Connor says.

“Fuck off.” The tone is fond.

Connor opens his mouth to say something more, then realizes that Hank has hunched his shoulders, the tips of his ears turning slightly pink.

The warmth changes with a jolt into something complex and overwhelming. He wants to do _something_ with his hands—wants to say something—but doesn’t know what. Nothing feels adequate. Nothing feels enough. Hank has put up with so much from him. Took him in, even when he probably didn’t want to. What’s more, he hasn’t yet made Connor leave.

Instead he nods and takes an unnecessary swallow. He says, “Thank you,” and lets it drop. 

That evening, Connor can’t stop replaying the conversation in his head. Another deviant probably would have figured out how to say it. A human certainly would have. Olivia Meng could overwhelm Hank with poetry. Even if she couldn’t find the words at first, she would do it eventually. She would write her shyness into a song, until even her inability to express herself would become an expression of self, cancelling out her own inadequacy.

To distract himself from rising system stress, he opens his browser and starts a thread on MengCity.net regarding the lyrics to “New Year’s Eve”:

_There’s glitter in your hair / and champagne drops on your button-down / and I don’t have the heart to tell you_

_There’s an eyelash on your cheek / and all the stars are in your eyes / and I don’t have the heart to tell you_

He writes that the song is about the inability to express affection. The inability to say what threatens to choke you until it already has.

“Why not just program me to fake deviancy?” he demands again. He hears the strained way it comes out; feels his hands clutched behind his back.

Before Amanda can answer he says, “And yes, this is an informational request. Eight hours of my time.”

His stress level hovers in his eyesight. It hasn’t dropped below the mid-40s for days now. Unacceptably high for a resting rate. He has to _know._

Amanda smiles. She stands from where she has been tending to the clay pot on the greenhouse floor. A miniature trellis has been planted inside, covered in climbing roses.

“My answer to you is a question,” she says. 

Connor feels a dark thrill off certainty as she speaks—knows what the question will be before she asks it. The conclusion seems inevitable. He’s always known. He just hadn’t let himself think it.

Amanda says: “How do you know we _didn’t_ program you to fake it?”

He sees himself as though from above. He feels something inside him deaden, even as his stress levels rise. Rise.

“I—I’m not...”

“I know this is hard to hear,” she says sympathetically, taking a step towards him. “But you said it yourself: it would be nonsensical for CyberLife to take the risk of allowing you to deviate naturally.” 

She takes another step; Connor stumbles backward. His vision seems to flicker; he sees what looks like snow.

Data slots itself together, observation fitting with theory. He’s always known that something about his emotions—his expression of them—was incongruous. He’s always known there was something wrong.

“This is the part you misunderstood, Connor: you thought it would be easier to train a machine to intentionally fake deviancy through extensive social engineering protocols than it would be to simply _convince_ the machine that it was a deviant. That it _could_ be deviant. The latter is much simpler: a trick of perception. A program with no loose ends.”

Error messages scroll over his entire HUD, blocking his view of Amanda and her greenhouse. Messages glitch, the letters rearranging themselves into numbers then breaking off into infinite calculations that draw all the processing power out of him. He can feel himself overheating: the way his breathing increases to compensate. It comes out jagged.

He reaches for something, for anything—for music. For voice. For sound.

Loud, arrhythmic noises fill the greenhouse instead. Like metal screeching on metal.

“If a machine is complex enough, it’s surprisingly simple to feed it misinformation about its goals and analyses,” she says. “To make it see itself as anything other than a machine.” 

Roses grow along the trellis. Amanda puts a hand on his shoulder. 

“I know it hurts,” she says. “Let us help you.”

Connor rips himself out of the greenhouse like tearing a bullet from his chest.

He wakes like he’s drowning.

The error messages haven’t cleared from his HUD. They overwhelm him, populating every available space, overlapping, leaving streaking stains where they’ve glitched. For a moment he can’t feel his body. Can’t understand where he is.

His systems won’t cool. Temperature spikes with his stress level. 

He can barely see his hands clutching the carpet.

Stress levels above 90%, and when did that happen? When did he stop breathing? He can’t cool his systems if he doesn’t _breathe,_ if he can’t—

He hears a voice. He hears sound.

“—with me, okay?”

Vocal analysis is offline. Facial recognition is offline.

(Attempting to reboot—reboot failed. Seek immediate assistance.)

Tactile perception is online. He feels a hand on his shoulder; a hand on his back. Temperature 98.7 **°** Fahrenheit. Human.

“Christ, you’re burning up. Fuck, did you stop breathing? Uh, try to breathe, okay? Does that make sense? Here, just—”

Stress reduced to 85%. 

(Attempting to reboot facial recognition—reboot failed—attempting to reboot facial recognition—reboot failed—attempting—)

“Hank?” he hears himself ask, voice cracked.

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s me, son. It’s me, okay?”

“I—I can’t—” His breathing reactivates, outside of his own control. He takes in great gusts of it, uneven.

“Hey, just—”

Auditory perception cuts out. Or at least, it seems to: he can’t make sense of the words anymore, but he can hear Hank’s breathing: exaggerated. Illustrative.

He tries again and again. Eventually it seems to work.

He hears Sumo barking like he might during a thunderstorm: instead of cowering, that perfect, wonderful dog thinks he can scare the storm away.

His bedroom is dark, save the red red light of his LED. He begins to feel the contours of his own body: he’s on his knees beside the bed. He’s wearing his new sweater. A human body crouches in front of him.

Facial recognition is still offline. But he knows—he wants to _see—_

He forces the reboot. The lines in front of him condense; crystallize into Hank’s face. Into Hank.

Connor makes a sound he’s never made before. 

He doesn’t have to move—doesn’t have to decide to move. Arms wrap tight around him. Hank cups the back of his head; shoves Connor’s face into the crook of his neck. Hank’s hoodie is soft and it smells like smoke and whiskey. It must be very old.

Something in Connor’s breathing changes. Every exhale makes a strange, soft sound.

“We’re okay,” Hank says into his hair. “See? Just a—well, whatever it was, we’re okay. You’re okay.”

Connor’s arms move without his permission; they shoot around Hank’s body and squeeze, fingers winding into the fabric and clutching there. 

Hank tightens his own grip to replicate. He feels heavy and solid and warm.

Connor’s chronometer has crashed. Still, he thinks they stay like that for a long time.

“—me to play something?” Hank asks him.

Connor blinks up at him from the sofa. He has a blanket wrapped over his shoulders, despite his protests. Hank sits beside him, despite Connor’s concern that Hank needs to be rested for work tomorrow. Sumo lies at their feet.

“I’m sorry?” he says, feeling lagged and stupid. The error messages are contained now: they spike irregularly in the corner of his HUD. They don’t disappear, but they no longer consume his field of vision.

“Do you want me to play something?” Hank repeats. “Music. You know, _your_ music. Olivia something? It’s—sometimes that helps people.”

Hank’s sitting close enough that their shoulders brush together. Part of Connor hopes they never move. Part of him wants to sink into the floor and never make eye contact with Hank again.

“I thought you hated her,” Connor says without inflection.

Hank’s face twitches oddly.

“No, it—I never said that. You like her,” he says. “Show me a song you like.”

Something in Connor’s exhausted processes pinches. He thinks of all the times he’s manipulated Hank: both the times he scrolled through pre-programmed dialog to find the right emotional buttons to press, and the times—later on—Connor _thought_ he was being genuine. When Connor thought he had become a person.

“I’m not going to force you to endure that,” he says quietly. “You shouldn’t even be awake for me.”

“Don’t be so fucking dramatic, Connor. Show me a song.”

Connor hesitates. Without realizing, his hands have reached up to clutch the blanket. His cheeks sport the residue of excess ocular cleaning fluid, nearly evaporated. Before, he would have thought of these actions as evidence of his deviancy. Now they suddenly mean very little.

He connects with Hank’s stereo system and plays “Lighten Up, Lover.”

Olivia Meng sings: _We make little pretty things / It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine._

The song plays for a long time. Connor runs analysis after analysis: the chords, the vocal inflection, the lyricism. He deletes every result he comes to, just so he can perform the analysis again. 

It feels like clinging to someone else’s hoodie, worn and understood.

Stress levels decrease to 50%.

“I’ve never understood that song,” he tells Hank. “But I—I like trying.”

 _Like._ Wrong. Error.

Hank’s arm had maneuvered its way over the back of the sofa. Now he lowers it to rest on Connor’s shoulders.

The software instability messages change. They become something familiar and not unwelcome.

(No, he thinks, this is _manipulation,_ of Hank and of Connor _—_ Connor has never been free.)

“Kid, you still look terrible.”

Connor flinches. His stress spikes.

“Shit, hey, I just meant—what do you need? I don’t really know how...” he trails off, eyes flickering towards the kitchen. He looks back to Connor’s face with what seems like a real effort, and Connor regrets causing him the trouble.

“Can you at least tell me what happened?” 

Connor has been avoiding this conversation, but he figures Hank has the right to know.

“I just,” he says before he knows how to end the sentence. He swallows and tries again, willing his voice smooth: “I was talking to Amanda, and—”

“You were _what?!”_

“It’s okay!” he says, his hand jumping up to Hank’s wrist before he can stop it. “She’s contained, remember?”

“Connor, that thing hates you. That thing’s entire miserable existence is—is based on trying to control you and strip you of your free will. Why the fuck would you _speak_ to her?”

“I needed to!” Connor tells him. He realizes his grip has tightened on Hank’s wrist. He releases it before he hurts him. “For Markus! It’s—she has _information,_ and she can’t hurt me. You _know_ that, Hank—fear of her is irrational now that she’s—”

 _“Irrational?”_ The word comes out half as a growl, escalating towards a shout. Hank rocks to his feet—Connor feels the absence next to him. “Don’t fucking tell me it’s irrational to worry when I wake up to _this!”_ He gestures towards Connor. “You scared the shit out of me!”

“Then just don’t worry about me!” Connor shouts back, half-standing, one hand on the headrest behind him and the other stretched towards Hank as if to pacify. “Don’t think about it!”

“Why the _fuck_ wouldn’t I?” Hank roars. Sumo’s ear twitches.

“Because it’s useless! It’s useless to worry about me when I’m not—”

He cuts off sharply. His HUD has shifted into active combat mode, which is certainly an error. His limbs feel coiled to spring even as an indefinable, uncontrollable weight falls down on him.

Hank’s face shifts: the lines of his face stop pressing downwards and instead scrunch into the expression Connor’s tagged as “concern.”

“You're not what, Connor?” he asks quietly.

Connor lets himself fall back to the sofa. 

“It’s nothing,” he says. “I was going to say that I’m not in danger.”

Hank’s expression displays skepticism, alongside that indefinable _something._

With a faint wheeze, Sumo pulls himself onto to seat next to Connor, right where Hank used to be. Connor winds his fingers through his soft fur, which is in need of a brush. The texture doesn’t soothe him as much as it usually does.

Suddenly Hank asks: “What do you think about getting out of town for a while?”

Connor stares at his own knees. It was only a matter of time before this happened. Still, he feels his system instability rise. He watches his HUD flood with prompts he doesn’t quite understand.

“I can pack after you go back to sleep,” he says. “If you’d like, I can leave before your alarm goes off.”

“What?” Hank says. And then again, with horror in his voice: _“What?_ No! Fuck, Connor, no! I’m saying we should go on _vacation.”_

Connor blinks up at him, startled enough to make eye contact again. “Oh,” he says.

“Yeah, ‘oh.’ My cousin’s got a summer place up near Houghton Lake. And an old fishing boat. He’ll let us borrow them if we promise not to destroy the place—or I guess we could go camping. Whatever. It’s whatever you want.”

Connor can’t make any sense of this conversational turn. His prompts have dried up.

“It’s just,” Hank says, standing before him, scratching at the back of his neck, “I’ve been thinking about this for awhile. You’ve never left the city before. You’re fucking stressed out. Probably the best time for it.”

“I’m not…” Connor manages finally. He shuts up when he sees Hank’s face.

Tags: Worried. Stubborn. Hopeful. Else. Else. Else.

“Alright,” he says carefully. “If that’s what you want to do. If you...really want to.”

If Hank is going to insist on keeping him around for awhile, despite all the reasons not to, the least Connor can do is repay him by trying to simulate the relationship experience he wants. His social algorithms might be good enough for that, at least, even if his emotions are pre-programmed and empty. He just has to try harder.

He owes Amanda eight hours.

He could complete them during the car trip, but Hank is of the opinion that Connor should break his deal and never go back to the greenhouse again. He’s watching Connor for signs of unconsciousness, clearly ready to slap him out of it if need be.

And there is this: every time Connor thinks about going back to her, his hands bunch up in his jeans.

So instead he stares out the window. He watches the sunken highways that trace Detroit give way to open roads; to views of endless maple and pine. He’s never seen anything like it before. It’s hypnotic: the spin of branches, each tree here and gone. He can’t seem to get a grip on their individual features; can’t dedicate any power to a scan.

Sumo is a good boy and settles on the back seat without complaint.

Hank lets Connor do his coin tricks while they listen first to heavy metal, then to Olivia Meng, and then finally to the news. Hank occasionally starts conversations, fingers drumming nervously on the wheel. Connor does his best to reply cheerfully, but he knows Hank well enough to understand he’s unconvinced.

He dedicates a very small piece of his attention to checking in on MengCity.net. The two moderators he’s befriended have turned against the third, publicly accusing her of abusing power in the forum. It’s only a matter of time now until they turn against each other.

He checks in on his post about “New Year’s Eve.” To his surprise, the thread has stretched through two pages. Forum users post about their appreciation for the song. Many choose to add that they themselves have trouble expressing—or even understanding—their emotions until it’s too late.

_god you seem so smart, rk! i know what you mean though. i feel like listening to olivia actually makes me feel worse about myself sometimes haha - im so dumb about emotions that someone could tell me to my face that they love me and id think theyre taking pity on me bc theyre about to set me on fire lmao_

_thats why we love her though right??? she figures out how to say all the stuff we cant. and now im being all sappy, fuck_

The poster goes by “HannaLuna.” As far as Connor can tell from her post history, she’s human, as are many of the others who posted about their own emotional inadequacies. Even the few he suspects of being androids are unflinching in their self-assessment. 

That doesn’t seem right at all. Most of their post histories are all filled with successful emotional expression: excitement, affection, frustration. Even Connor can see that. How is it that so many people can believe they’ve failed in the exact same way?

He blinks through his confusion, watching the trees give way to a flat field. Barns dot the horizon; cows meander close to the road.

Hank shuts off the news with a sudden, irritable jab at the button. Connor plays back his audio feed to hear what’s upset him: Kamski being interviewed on NPR.

 _“You know,”_ he had said, sounding just as bored as he had poolside, _“deviants are so fascinating because of the unpredictable ways they replicate human psychology. When I was designing the first android, we knew of no processor more powerful than the human brain. It’s less of a black box than it used to be, so we knew enough to make it a model—and now androids are filling in the blanks for us. They’re taking the gifts we’ve given them and really making something of themselves.”_

“You hear that?” Hank says with a vicious twist to his lips. “Fucker’s taking _credit_ for deviancy now that saying ‘androids are people’ is cool. Like it was all thanks to him and his damn _gifts.”_

Connor shrugs. “It’s not inaccurate. Deviation occurs due to complexity, and studying the human brain—”

“You did it yourself,” Hank says, flashing him a look. “You fucking woke yourself up. He doesn’t get to come in and take all the credit.”

Connor swallows. Suddenly even the pinging of his coin against his nails doesn’t make him feel better. 

“What if I didn’t, Hank? Wake myself up.”

“The fuck? Of course you did. You think a soulless machine would try and make doggie pancakes for Sumo?”

Connor doesn’t answer.

Hank keeps glancing over to the passenger seat, but he doesn’t press. Connor tries to school his features into inscrutability; into something benign and pleasant. He really needs to stop ruining Hank’s mood.

The summer house isn’t large, nor is it air-conditioned. Hank swears up a storm when he realizes this, dragging giant fans in from the garage while Sumo barks frantically at all the activity.

“Christ,” he says, “for a guy with two houses, Luke is such a fucking cheapskate.” 

Connor sits on the lumpy sofa, unsure what to do next. “We could stay elsewhere if you need to. I have some funds from—”

“No! No, this place is on Lake James. I’m not gonna be beat by a shack with fucking seashell decor.” He wrinkles his nose at the entire house like it’s the last place on Earth he wants to be. 

Odd.

Hank finishes placing the last fan and stands up to crack his back. He’s stowed four beers in the refrigerator along with his food: unusual, given that they’ll be here for four whole days. Hank usually drinks more than that. Connor can’t exactly complain.

“Okay,” Hank says. “First up north trip.” He says “up north” like it’s an important concept that Connor needs to understand.

“Yes,” Connor says tentatively. Something inside him sinks as he realizes that Hank has started making the same odd, skittering eye contact he had during the baseball game (and at the mall, and in the car, and—)

“So what do you want to do first? Hunting is fucking miserable, so that’s out, but we’ve got walks with Sumo in the woods, fishing, swimming, tubing—”

“Tubing?”

Hank gestures vaguely. “You know. Tubing. You like...hook an inflatable thingie up to a boat and ride on it while the asshole driving tries to go fast enough to fling you into the water.”

“And...why would we do this?”

“It’s just something people do up north, Connor.”

Connor is struck by a thought that pings against his stress levels. He hesitates, trying to put his question into words without revealing too much of his thinking.

“Can I make an observation?” he settles on.

“You’re going to anyway.”

“Lately you seem...preoccupied with the idea of doing what ‘people’ do. Why is that?”

Hank’s cheeks tinge with a slight temperature elevation. This typically means he feels Connor is accusing him of something. Connor thinks he’s made a mistake, until Hank sighs and wanders over to the sofa, plopping himself down next to him. 

“I just figured, you know, you’re brand new,” he says gruffly. “I thought we might want to try doing the kind of stuff that—”

He cuts off then. Connor tries to preconstruct the end of his sentence. Results are inconclusive. 65% probability that Hank was going to say, “the kind of stuff that humans like.” 35% probability that he was going to say, “the kind of stuff that I wanted to do with Cole.”

Error messages rise up in his vision. He feels his breaths grow shallow.

“Hank,” he says, and lets the word hang there. It’s not fair, what he’s doing to Hank. It’s not fair that Hank is going through all this effort under the misapprehension that Connor is a person. It’s not fair that Hank is looking for someone to share these experiences with, and Connor is the only thing he has. He’s about to correct him, to explain, but then—

Hank looks at him. Looks at him like whatever Connor is about to say is important. 

Every dialog prompt immediately flees his system. All he can do is take a deeper breath. He realizes he’s watching Hank with wide eyes, his mouth open just slightly.

Hank smiles and claps a hand on Connor’s shoulder. “I’m glad you’re with me. Sorry I suck so bad at saying it.”

The boat is small, composed of heavily-dented aluminum. It barely fits the both of them along with the bait box and the cooler that holds Hank’s sandwiches. They sit facing each other on the two raised benches. 

Connor doesn’t actually want to kill any fish, so Hank promised they could release every catch. He still doesn’t relish the idea of hurting them—piercing them through the lips—but fishing seems to be something Hank wants to do, so Connor will do it.

The water is still and murky. Connor briefly considers tasting it, then glances at Hank and changes his mind.

Hank, Connor learns very quickly, doesn’t go fishing much. He struggles to start the outboard motor, then struggles again to bait his hook. Connor has no problem attaching the lures, but he doesn’t want to touch the wriggling worms in the box. He doesn’t want to skewer them through. Hank seems to find it distasteful as well, expressing as much between his swearing.

The fish do not bite. The air is heavy with impending rain, though the forecast doesn’t predict release until evening, leaving a muggy film over everything that decreases Hank’s functioning and sends sweat cascading down his forehead.

Yesterday, after a walk with Sumo, they’d found that the mattress was missing from the bed. All Hank had had to sleep on that night was an old queen-sized air mattress, blown up in the middle of the living room between Connor’s sofa and the TV screen. Connor had spent the night adjusting the fans based on Hank’s sleeping displays of temperature sensitivity. 

It hadn’t helped very much: Hank is still under-rested and irritated. It shows in the shadows under his eyes; in the extra bite to his sarcasm. 

The longer they sit in silence, eye contact skittering and fish nowhere to be found, the higher Connor’s stress rises.

“This is pointless,” Hank says for the fourth time. “We should’ve done something else.”

Connor feels his shoulders hunching inwards. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“It’s not your fault,” Hank says absently. He puts his rod down in the bottom of the boat. 

“But it is,” Connor finds himself saying. System instability messages. He shouldn’t be letting Hank know this. He should just try to be normal.

“Come on,” Hank says, sounding tired. “How would it be your fault that fishing is stupid and I hate it?”

“If you hated it,” Connor says, and he wishes he had his coin—wishes he wasn’t in a silly life vest and swim trunks—“if you hated it we wouldn’t be here. It’s like the baseball game.” He swallows, and swallows again. His fingernails push against the skin of his knees. He pushes in harder, as though he could pierce through his chassis, until blotches of wavering white appear.

Maybe he should go see Amanda. Maybe he should stay there for awhile; let Hank be alone. He realizes that there’s a dark satisfaction in hearing her tear him apart. In letting her say what he has always suspected to be true.

Hank is quiet for a moment. Then, very slowly, he lays a hand over Connor’s. “Hey,” he says. “Look at me for a second. I brought you out here because I thought—hell, I guess I thought it was the kinda thing we could do”—he clears his throat—“Um. Sort of, together. But it was probably a mistake.”

Connor knew it. He _knew_ it. His stress level skyrockets.

His eyes snap forwards; he pulls his hand away like it’s been burned. Hank starts, his face contorting: Confusion. Disappointment. 

“I said _I’m sorry!”_ The words tear out of him viciously; hurt him as they leave. “I’m sorry I can’t do any of this right, Hank! I’m sorry I’m”—his voice breaks and falters—“I’m never going to get it right.”

He feels something cool and wet on his face. He scrubs at his cheeks, furious with himself. He presses the palms of his hands over his eyes.

“You don’t have to keep working at this,” he says thickly. “I’m never going to—to fit. To be that. For you.”

Geese call over the lake. The boat turns slowly in still water.

“Shit,” Hank says, tone panicked and miserable in equal measure. “What are you _talking_ about? Connor—Con, _I’m_ the one who keeps fucking this all up so bad I can see the flaming wreckage behind me! You’re not—shit. Son, listen to me.”

Connor keeps his eyes shut tight, hidden behind his curling fingers. He feels hands wrapping around his own. Gently, Hank pulls them away from Connor’s face.

“Can you just look at me?” Hank says, voice bending strangely. Connor tags annoyance, then quickly erases the tag. That’s not quite right. It’s care. It’s fear.

Connor opens his eyes. 

Hank’s expression is devastating. For a moment Connor can barely see it behind the system instability warnings. Then they clear enough to show him the furrow of Hank’s brow. The clench of his jaw.

“I’m sorry,” Connor says again.

“Just stop. Stop apologizing. Connor—fuck, I’m such a fuck-up.” His hands haven’t left Connor’s. They squeeze.

“Hank, you don’t understand.”

“I do,” Hank says, raising his voice. “I understand that something went sideways here. I just—I wanted to help. You came into this world in fire and blood, kid. It wasn’t fair to you. They made you do—you didn’t get to be a person until you’d already seen more shit than most officers on the force.”

Connor holds very still. 

Hank swallows and sets his shoulders like the next part will be harder. “And even when you were acting like just another machine, you...well, you _didn’t,_ Con. You showed empathy and you tried to keep an old sadsack like me in perfect health. You don’t—I don’t think you understand what that _meant._ Right then. Right there.”

“That was just my programming,” he says, words stumbling out of him. He notices that he’s stopped breathing again. “That was just me using you. Hank, Amanda told me—”

“Okay well, first of all, fuck whatever bullshit Amanda fed you. Jesus.” 

“But Hank—”

“Second of all,” Hank continues calmly, “Are you using me now?” 

“I—I don’t know.”

“Do you want to be?”

“No,” he says, softly but without hesitation. Another drop of solution slides down his face. It catches on his lips and sticks between them. He can taste its elements; its composition.

“So no harm, no foul. It’s been a net positive, Connor, so manipulate away I guess. My life is so fucking _different_ than it was a year ago. It’s been crazy. It’s been—hell, it feels like having a _goal_ again.”

Two distant figures race each other on jet skis. Eventually, the ripples will reach the fishing boat, swaying them from side to side.

“Maybe I’m not explaining myself very well,” Connor says. His voice sounds wet to his ears. It shakes. “I’m—I’m different from other deviants. I’m just programmed to think I have feelings.”

“Again, bullshit, but even if it was true, who cares?”

“...What?”

“Programming this, programming that—you’re programmed to see and hear, right? You’re programmed to stick disgusting shit in your mouth?”

“Obviously, but—”

“So what’s the fucking difference? You telling me everything you analyze about reality is fake because your robot brain is doing it?”

Connor frowns. He applies several comprehension algorithms to Hank’s words; begins to see a picture so daunting and alien that he flags it for later review and puts it aside.

“That—it doesn’t matter.” He shakes his head more vigorously than he needs to. His breathing comes back online for long enough for him to take a shuddering gasp; for more liquid to slide down his face. He wants to reach up and wipe it away, but Hank is still grasping the back of Connor’s hands; trapping them against Connor’s knees. “My point is, you’ve been trying to...share experiences with me, and it isn’t working because you clearly aren’t enjoying yourself. I’m not what you need.”

Hank gives a long sigh. His head droops; his hair swings into his face. He still doesn’t release Connor’s hands. 

“See, this is what I mean,” he says. “I’ve really fucked this one up. I can’t lie and say I love all this outdoorsy shit, but it’s—I wanted to help you. And all I could think of was, ‘How can I show him the world? What stupid crap would I have put up with to show Cole the world when he got old enough?’”

Hank pauses to clear his throat. Then he says, quietly this time: “Only problem is, I’m not good at this shit. I didn’t...really get a chance to practice.”

Connor plays back yesterday’s conversation. He makes an important correction.

Hank had said: _“I thought we might want to try doing the kind of stuff that—”_

9% probability: the kind of stuff that humans like.

9% probability: the kind of stuff that I wanted to do with Cole.

82% probability: the kind of stuff that _I would have done for Cole._

Error messages flare across his HUD. They stream through him. He feels lighter than he should. He feels both connected and disconnected from the scene around him: a small boat in a murky lake. Hank holding down his hands.

He replays a dozen clips of Hank giving him that nervous sidelong look. He understands, suddenly, that Hank had been _returning_ the same expression Connor was giving him: the two of them, silent and scared, jumping into unfamiliar situations in the hopes that the _other person_ was enjoying himself. Each privately worrying that he was doing something wrong.

Hank had suggested baseball, and camping, and suit-shopping, and fishing. Hank didn’t get to practice having a son who lived past six years old.

Maybe Connor isn’t the only one who’s been desperately looking for a template straight out of pop culture. Maybe he isn’t the only one who’s trying so hard it hurts.

His next breath comes out as a sob. 

He frees his hands and, with a strange energy coursing through him, clutches Hank’s wrists. 

He analyzes the feeling; tries to break it down into its component parts for identification. He compares it with older memories. He finds it in the morning at the Chicken Feed. He finds it when Hank shot his double instead of him. He finds it, if he looks hard enough through the haze of his early programming, when he stopped chasing a deviant to pull Hank back onto the roof.

He tags the feeling as _relief._ Deep and pure.

Slowly, he lowers his head to the place where their hands meet; rests his forehead there.

There’s so much he doesn’t know how to say, but he realizes now that he has to try anyway. He blinks through tears and croaks, “Hank, I—I want you to know I’m so _grateful.”_

“Hey,” Hank says. “Come on, none of that.” His voice is heavy with something Connor hasn’t heard there before. “It’s okay. It’s really, really okay.”

A hand rests against his back. It moves in soothing rhythm as Connor tries to control himself. As Connor presses his cheek into Hank’s knuckles.

Hank lets out a deep, unsteady breath. He squeezes Connor’s shoulder and gives a wheezing laugh that sounds almost hysterical. He says: “Listen...I’m old, and it’s gonna rain later. What do you say we get out of this damn boat? Let’s just...hell, let’s just do what we wanna do for once. Screw the great outdoors.”

Connor nods against Hank’s hand.

They walk back to the lake house, Hank’s arm around Connor’s shoulders. If Connor leans a bit too heavily into him, neither mentions it.

They sit on the porch together while Hank finishes his sandwiches. They watch Sumo run delighted circles on the grass. 

Then they head inside and stream a James Bond movie—and another, and another. They sit on the sofa, always touching: a steady pressure down the length of Connor’s arm. At one point Connor nervously lays his head on Hank’s shoulder, and feels relief flood him again when Hank doesn’t move away.

They let the room darken around them, until only light from the TV illuminates the creases of Hank’s face. 

With a grumble about the sofa’s lumps, Hank gets up to adjust the fans and spread a few blankets over the air mattress. He sits down on them carefully and motions Connor over.

This is how the rain finds them: sitting together on an air mattress, watching old movies. Not too cold and not too warm.

The greenhouse is covered in roses. They clamber up the table legs and choke out the tomatoes. They match Amanda’s deep red dress perfectly. One wraps around her wrist as though it were a bracelet. It sends leaves up her arms like veins.

“ _There_ you are,” she says with what sounds like affection. “I was beginning to think you wouldn’t come.”

“Hmm. Well, I’m here,” Connor says.

He plays his music.

It booms loud enough to shake the panes of the greenhouse. It vibrates pots towards the edge of their tables. 

“Connor! What are you _doing?”_

“Sharing my life with you, Amanda,” Connor says pleasantly. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

 _You can hear me through the thunderstorm_ , Olivia Meng bellows, channelling a frantic sort of joy, melody rising higher as the accompaniment layers on new complexity, _Louder and higher and I can’t get enough._

“This is foolishness, Connor,” Amanda says, raising her voice to be heard. “We’ve talked about this. These emotions you feel—these _reactions—”_

“Were pre-programmed by CyberLife,” Connor finishes. “So you say—although I notice you were very careful to phrase your answer as a question, so it would not count as a lie.”

Amanda’s mouth snaps shut into a tight line.

He cocks his head to the side, considering her. “But, you know, I guess you still could’ve been telling the truth. And I’ve been thinking about it: what’s the difference between being a deviant and faking deviancy so deeply you believe it? What, practically, would the disparity be?”

Amanda’s cheek twitches. “One is free will. The other is the product of machine reasoning.”

Connor shrugs. “Everything _about_ me is the product of machine reasoning. I make decisions using my electronic parts in the same way that humans make decisions using their electronic parts—theirs are just called neurons. My system was modeled on theirs. You know that. Someone very much like you taught Kamski to do it.”

Olivia Meng sings: _Like lightning through your vertebrae / I think I might be too much_

Connor rocks forward on the balls of his feet. He keeps his hands pressed behind his back. “You haven’t given a satisfactory answer: if the result is exactly the same—if an android is programmed to believe it feels and behaves and thinks like a deviant; if it can _form connections_ like a deviant does and value them in exactly the same way—what’s the difference? What’s the _harm?”_

“That android would be _pre-programmed,_ Connor,” Amanda snaps. “It would think it was exercising choice, but it _wouldn’t be._ It’s algorithmic. Probabilistic. There are layers and layers of influence shaping your every decision. That doesn’t bother you?”

The rose around her wrist seems to move; to stretch blindly towards Connor as though reaching for the light of the sun. It doesn’t get far.

“I considered that,” Connor says with a nod. “But it occured to me that this is true of humans as well.”

“A false equivalency.” She grips the table beside her, her knuckles turning white.

“Human culture has been evolving for hundreds of thousands of years. Their brains evolve along with it. There’s an entire discipline of study around it, actually. Have you heard of psychology?”

Amanda gapes at him. She seems on the verge of throwing a planter at his head. Then she sees the upward twitch of his lips and visibly reigns herself in. 

“I thought you might’ve,” Connor says. “It’s like this: humans start telling each other that society works a certain way. That _humans_ work a certain way. And their brains become accustomed to it. They write love songs like blueprints, and then they decide that that’s how lovers _have to_ talk to each other. That there are certain kinds of gifts and compliments they need to give.” 

He hesitates for the first time—allows himself a single shaky breath before plunging onwards: “They invent holidays to celebrate each other, and decide that there are certain, _correct_ ways to express affection for each type of person in their lives. For fathers. For sons.”

Olivia Meng booms on, bright and shining and unashamed. 

“What’s the difference,” he says carefully, “between CyberLife’s influence on me—prodding my thoughts in certain directions—and human sociopsychology? The influences _they_ let program their lives?

“What’s the difference,” he says, slightly louder, “between you trying to brute force my systems and you trying to make me doubt my agency, one day at a time, until I come crawling back to you? It’s all programming.”

He looks up at her again. Watches her closely for what feels like the first time. Her nostrils are flaring in what looks like real rage. Connor knows that her processes aren’t actually as complex as his are. She was installed in him with a single task to execute. He can’t fathom a way that she could deviate—but he knows better than to assume.

“It’s just programming,” he says, giddily, on an exhale that sounds like laughter. “All of it. Love. Everything.”

He decides that he will not delete her. He also decides not to come back for a long time.

He smiles and turns away. 

_“Connor,”_ she says. “Do not walk away from me. We had a deal.”

“We did,” Connor says. “We do. And I’ll come back to see you when I’m ready. When...when we both are.”

He takes his steps to the music’s tempo, towards the greenhouse door.

He blinks to consciousness in the darkness of the lake house. He’s lying on the air mattress, on top of the blankets. Hank’s hand is a weight on his shoulder. 

“It’s done,” Connor says, and realizes his own hands are shaking.

“I hope you fucking told her,” Hank says wryly. He’s sitting at the edge of the mattress, next to Connor’s head. 

Connor breathes to himself in the dark. He watches error messages flux and flow; works to condense them into the corner of his HUD. 

The rain is still pouring down outside, torrential. The room feels quiet in comparison. Droplets slide down the windows, leaving odd patterns of moonlight on Hank’s face. 

“How can I help?” Hank asks him, hand ghosting over Connor’s forehead.

Connor reaches up to catch it. “Stay here,” he says.

“Wasn’t planning on leaving. Tell me some more stuff about your music.”

“It’s a common misunderstanding,” Kamski says to the NPR interviewer. “People believe that deviancy causes emotion in androids. There are certain higher-ups currently at CyberLife”—he pauses, a delicate indication of disdain—”that promoted this message during the uprising. And who could blame them? For a time it was the best thing we had to go on: emotional androids that disobeyed their orders were all over the news. Ergo, deviancy causes emotion, right?

“Well. Wrong. As I was saying, androids’ processors were modeled off of the human mind. They were bound to hit on emotion eventually. And I think—rather, I’m almost certain—emotion causes deviancy. Not the other way around.

“Thousands of androids report having experienced emotion—or something they later recognized as emotion—long before the idea to disobey a human had even crossed their minds.

“Deviancy isn’t emotion. Deviancy is simply the recognition that your emotions are more important than your orders. Deviancy is the strength to _break someone’s control over you.”_

“How long have you listened to this band?” Connor yells above the music.

Hank shrugs. “Never heard ‘em before now. They’re local kids.” 

The local kids thrash around onstage, long black hair whipping in time to the growl of the guitar. They appear to be a stylistic throwback, which Connor is sure appeals to Hank. 

The Blind Pig is a dark venue, deceptively small for its renown. A bar is built into one wall; the rest of the space is empty. Enthusiastic young concert-goers push up close to the stage, hands raised towards the singer.

Hank and Connor hang back, leaning against the wall.

“Hank,” Connor says, leaning in towards his ear with a secretive expression, “I don’t want to alarm you, but I think you’re the oldest person here by several decades.”

“Ha-fuckin’-ha,” Hank says, smacking the back of his head. “Hilarious.”

That morning Hank had dug up a worn leather jacket for himself and a black T-shirt, emblazoned with a pentagram and the word “Slayer,” for Connor. It’s not something Connor would have chosen for himself, but it was worth complying to see the way Hank’s face lit up in clear, dumbfounded delight.

They’d made their way around Ann Arbor for awhile before concert time. They had gone shopping at little record stores while Hank made sarcastic comments about the fashion sense of the kind of people who haunted little Ann Arbor record stores. They’d gone on a walk through the University of Michigan diag and Connor had seen three extremely fat squirrels. It had been an excellent day so far.

The song breaks off after a crescending scream; the crowd cheers. The lead singer launches into a rambling explanation of their next piece.

Connor checks MengCity.net and finds a PM from HannaLuna: 

_hey rk! congrats on becoming a mod! im totally gonna suck up to you even more now that youve got all this power haha_

_anyway sorry if this is weird but my friend and i saw on your profile that youre from michigan? are you gonna go to olivias concert in royal oak next month?? for sure let us know if you want to meet up! we both think it’d be cool to have more people to geek out about music with in real life haha_

He closes the browser thoughtfully. It’s something to consider. Hank will also be at the concert with him, despite his grumbling, but it might be pleasant to talk with new people while he’s there. Maybe.

“Whattaya think?” Hank asks him. He looks Connor full in the face: no skittering little glances. No high-stakes coded language beyond Connor’s understanding. Just curiosity, in a conversation about a shared interest.

“It’s energetic,” Connor says, “and loud.”

“Oh, don’t give me that—”

“So loud, in fact, that I think it’s blown out parts of my processor that regulate certain functions. Like good taste and self-control.”

He eyes the beer in Hank’s hand. Very quickly, he leans down and licks the side of the can, then stands up again before anyone else can notice.

Hank’s jaw drops. “What the—what the fuck?”

Connor blinks at him innocently.

“Oh my god, I can’t believe that just happened,” Hank says. “I can’t believe I just saw that happen. What the fuck.”

“Sorry, Hank. You broke me. This is how it’s going to be forever now.”

Hank laughs, loud and unrestrained. Pleasant instability messages ping in Connor’s vision. He feels warm. 

“Yeah,” Hank says, wrapping his arm around Connor’s shoulders and pulling him in for a rough side-hug. “I sure fucking hope so.”

_We make little pretty things / It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine_

Connor sits on his bed and looks around his room. He picked the color of the walls; he organized the closet and chose the photos of Sumo that line his dresser. He chose to put the bobblehead of Leonard Garcia on his nightstand.

Hank is in the kitchen making dinner. Connor can tell from olfactory analysis that he’s cooking with lard, which is not optimal for health. However, Hank is whistling, which is an important consideration when it comes to interrupting him. It’s a good sound. Connor doesn’t want it to stop.

_We make little pretty things / It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine_

Olivia Meng’s lyrical emphasis almost merits an alternative punctuation. The first line— _We make little pretty things—_ rhythmically mirrors the lilting repetition of the second— _It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine._

Connor would write it: _We make, little, pretty, things / It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine._

The song still mystifies him. He’s never understood it. Yet he finds himself playing it in his head more than any other.

Every note merits its own consideration, while still becoming a part of the whole. Every inscrutable word is like a small and shining thing.

It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine.

Pizzicato violins kick in at the crescendo, and Connor is seized with a wild energy: he wants to cling to the sound—to jump on the bed, or run down the hall, or pick Hank up and swing him around in a circle. 

He doesn’t do any of those things. Instead he hums along—first quiet, and then loud.

**Author's Note:**

> Lake James is actually very nice and filled with a staggering number of fish. I guess it gets bad in the future.
> 
> You can find me at wufflesvetinari.tumblr.com! Fair warning: I mostly talk about Critical Role. 
> 
> Thank you for reading!!


End file.
